Heritage

Today in one of my classes at church the woman giving the lesson started out the class with a question:  "What do you think of when you think of the heritage you will leave for your family and for future generations of your descendants?"  

That got me thinking. What will I leave for my family after I die?  I automatically thought of things that will last, (since I don't really imagine us leaving any significant financial inheritance for our descendants). 

The first thing that came to my mind was leaving all the genealogy research, family histories, and photos of our family & ancestors that I have collected and preserved copies of.  Genealogy has always been special to me, and I've spent a significant amount of time researching my ancestors over the years. And now as my mom and I have been trying to get together each week (now that the boys are all at school during the day), and we are working to find our Bohemian ancestors now that their records are available online on the Czech archive websites, and working hard to translate their records and follow all the clues we can find to learn more about our ancestral families, I assume we will have years of work left to do on these family lines.  And it's so sweet to have the opportunity to do temple work for these ancestors that we've done so much work to research.  I feel that the genealogy work I do, and my love for my family and learning our family history, are things that I can pass down to my children and descendants. 

As much as I love genealogy and as important as I feel it is, that is not the most important inheritance I want to leave to my children. 

I would like my heritage to be raising children who love to spend time together as a family, who learn responsibility and honesty, who learn to be hard workers, who love to read the scriptures and to read for pleasure, who want to attend church and church activities, who like to serve others, and try to show kindness and be good friends.  I want to raise children who love spending time in nature, who will want to go to the temple regularly, and who will try hard to accomplish the tasks they try to do throughout their lives. I realize that once our children get older they will make their own choices, but I hope that  they will choose to go to college and work hard to graduate, since I found that finishing college was a good experience for me, and a very good example for my family.  And I hope my boys will choose to serve missions for our church when they are older. 

And most importantly, I hope to raise boys who will eventually grow up and each choose to be married to a good woman in the temple, to have families of their own, to spend quality time with their families, and to teach them the gospel and continue to make church and the temple a priority in their lives. I hope to have many years when Michael and I can visit with our grown boys and their families and have good relationships with them too. 

That's what is most important to me. 

(And considering this, and writing it down, has also been a good thing for me to do. Because I just realized that so many of the little things I may worry about on a day to day basis are not things that are most important to me in the long run. So this is a good reminder to me not to spend too much time worrying about little things -- as long as we are doing out best, the little things in life will work themselves out -- but also not to spend too much time focusing on the trivial things in life, and make sure to make time for these things that are most important).